ING Bank Signs Five Year Deal for Blockchain Technology

ING, the Dutch banking giant, now has access to unlimited Corda Enterprise licenses after signing a five year deal with R3, blockchain technology provider. The deal also allows ING to use Corda Enterprise throughout its various operations worldwide.

According to a press release by R3, the Dutch bank will be able to adopt CorDapps across business areas. CorDapps in production on Corda Enterprise cover a wide range of financial services activity including trade finance, identity, insurance and capital markets. The press release says “Corda Enterprise is a commercial distribution of Corda R3’s open source blockchain platform designed to meet the demands of modern-day businesses. It leverages the unique features of Corda-privacy, consensus, interoperability, ease-of-integration.” Corda Enterprise also offers additional features which are targeted at the needs of large and complex organizations such as Blockchain Application Firewall, 24/7 support, dedicated product management and support for industry-standard enterprise databases.

Annerie Vreugdenhil, Head of Innovation for Wholesale Banking at ING, said the agreement between ING and R3 marked a huge milestone towards empowering clients to transition to a distributed economy. Vreugdenhil said the venture with R3 is the most mature enterprise (distributed ledger technology) solution to serve the needs of the financial service industry. “We are one step closer to deploying live DLT solutions for our clients with the supported infrastructure in place.”

The Chief Executive Officer of R3, David E. Rutter said they valued ING as their long-term partner. Rutter goes onto describe ING as an enthusiastic adopter of blockchain technology. “As ING takes full advantage of access to Corda Enterprise, we look forward to seeing how the diverse CorDapp ecosystem can deliver gains in productivity.”